Theary in nightclub | Music | 00:00 |
| CAMPBELL: It's the end of a hard week in Phnom Penh and Seng Teary is taking time out. At 36, she's the epitome of a modern Cambodian woman -- a US-trained lawyer, successful author and manager of a large aid group. But like all Cambodians over 30, there's sadness behind her smiles and deep wounds beneath the surface of success. | 00:19 |
| SENG: I always thought of myself as abnormal, because I grew up an orphan and then went to America where I was always highlighted as an orphan. The tragedy I think of the Khmer Rouge years is that my life here in Cambodia is the norm. Here | 00:49 |
Seng. Super: Seng Theary | I am one of many, many orphans. So to be an orphan is the norm here. | 01:10 |
Theary in nightclub | Music | 01:16 |
Khieu Samphan reading | CAMPBELL: This is the man she blames for shattering her life -- the former Khmer Rouge Head of State, Khieu Samphan. Still living freely, he claims he had no idea his party was butchering its people. | 01:40 |
Khieu Samphan | SAMPHAN: Why, why, why? That is the question I ask myself. CAMPBELL: You don't know? SAMPHAN: I don't know. At the time I did not know, I did not know. | 01:55 |
| SENG: He's lying. How can he not know? He was one of the top three or four Khmer Rouge leaders. | 02:07 |
Seng | I mean he's not going to tell the truth, because mass murderers don't normally tell truths. | 02:17 |
Children look at paintings of atrocities | Music | 02:24 |
| CAMPBELL: The ultra-leftist Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. | 02:31 |
| All over the country, people were starved, tortured and executed. | 02:40 |
| It was a nightmarish world where even babies and children were killed as class traitors. | 02:48 |
Yugoslav documentary footage | But the leaders hailed it as a workers' paradise. | 03:01 |
| SINGING: The bright revolutionary ideology | 03:05 |
| CAMPBELL: The Khmer Rouge renamed the country Kampuchea, closing it to all foreigners except a handful of communist allies like Yugoslavia that echoed its propaganda. | 03:24 |
| COMMENTARY SERBO-CROAT: In a society of equals, to Kampucheans the co-operative is everything. He lives there, works there, is born there and dies there. | 03:35 |
Pol Pot documentary footage | CAMPBELL: The Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, known as Brother Number 1, insisted they were creating a peasant utopia. | 03:48 |
Yugoslav documentary footage | In reality, it was class warfare on an epic scale. The cities were forcibly evacuated, the middle class all but exterminated. | 03:57 |
| DOCUMENTARY NARRATION: Who are these boys and girls who barely stand at the machines? The answer is, those are the children of the revolution. | 04:09 |
| SENG: We were units of production. Individuality was erased, was considered a crime, and communication and family relationships were considered crimes. | 04:17 |
| CAMPBELL: The Khmer Rouge ordered city dwellers to work in rural communes. | 04:28 |
Smiling girl working in rice field | But it was nothing like the village scenes that can be seen today. SENG: The sense of community that's being built here and the colours and the laughter - | 04:36 |
Children in rice field | I think it's such a contrast to what happened under the Khmer Rouge years, where everyone was in black and you just sensed the heaviness and the fear. | 04:50 |
Seng. Super: Seng Theary | We had to work from morning until night doing this work, with no breaks, | 05:04 |
Children in rice field | but more than that, the emotional drainage of working and not being able to talk, and not having the ability to smile or to laugh and to have conversations. | 05:09 |
Photo. Seng as child | Music | 05:23 |
| CAMPBELL: Seng Theary was just four years old when her family was forced out of Phnom Penh. | 05:26 |
Photo. Seng's parents | Her schoolteacher father was the first to die. He was executed for having worked for the former regime. Two years later, it was her mother's turn. | 05:31 |
Paintings of atrocities | SENG: First they took us to prison. They took my four brothers, my mum, and my dad's dad. | 05:46 |
| And every night they would chain everyone and they tried to chain my ankles, | 05:58 |
Seng | but I was 6,7, I was anorexic, skin and bone, so my ankles could slip in and out of the shackles. | 06:04 |
Photo. Mother with Seng and siblings | CAMPBELL: Eventually, the Khmer Rouge came for her mother. SENG: That night, everyone was asleep, chained except for my youngest brother and I, and we snuggled next to my mum. And then two prison guards came. | 06:14 |
Photo. Mother | CAMPBELL: When she failed to return the next morning, Seng Theary knew her mother was dead. SENG: I felt a new sensation where | 06:26 |
Seng | I was just an empty frame. I felt like my whole inside was gutted. | 06:35 |
Scenery | Music | 06:39 |
Temple ruins | CAMPBELL: Invading Vietnamese forced the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979. But the movement continued to occupy vast rural strongholds, even turning ancient temples into fortresses. | 06:46 |
| Music | 07:00 |
| CAMPBELL: The fighting didn't end until 1998. | 07:04 |
| Music | 07:08 |
Preah Vihear temple | CAMPBELL: This temple at Preah Vihear is where the remnants of the Khmer Rouge fighters finally laid down their arms nine years ago, after decades of bloodshed and civil war. In the four years they ruled Cambodia in the 1970s, up to | 07:13 |
| 2 million people are believed to have died, from starvation, disease, torture and execution. Amazingly, not a single one of the Khmer rouge leaders has ever had to answer for his crimes - until now. | 07:27 |
Tribunal opening | In June, a joint local and international court was finally opened to try the few Khmer Rouge leaders still alive. Its supporters hope it will mark a turning point for this blighted nation. | 07:44 |
| But many believe it is only one step in a journey that has just begun. | 08:01 |
| SENG: Cambodians are using this court more as a catalyst to focus on other elements of justice, and that's dialogue and that's healing and that's reconciliation. | 08:08 |
Seng | And those for me are more important components of justice than just this very narrow legal process. | 08:19 |
Butterflies/ Seng at temple | Music | 08:28 |
| CAMPBELL: Seng Theary has spent her life trying to deal with the injustice she suffered. | 08:36 |
| It left her a broken child, then a traumatised teenager, even after escaping to Thailand and then to the US. | 08:43 |
| Music | 08:51 |
| SENG: I was suicidal in high school. I was very, very angry for many, many, many years. | 08:55 |
| I was emotionally weighed down, it was so burdensome to constantly be angry | 09:02 |
Seng | I did let go. I'm still emotional, but I did let go. | 09:11 |
Seng at market with spiders | Seng: Can I see the spiders? | 09:17 |
| CAMPBELL: Seven years ago she came home to rediscover the childhood she never had. | 09:25 |
| Seng: Can I touch? | 09:29 |
| CAMPBELL: She runs the Centre for Social Development, an organisation working for social justice and reconciliation. | 09:31 |
| Woman: These are the fangs Be careful or it might bite! | 09:39 |
Village in country | CAMPBELL: Every week, Theary and her staff travel to the countryside to organise forums where villagers can discuss their troubles, their fears and their anger. | 09:48 |
Driving to Pol Pot's brother's. Super: Seng Theary | SENG: We're going to Pol Pot's brother's house. We're going to meet him and his family and we're going to invite him to come to our public forum on justice and reconciliation in light of the Khmer Rouge tribunal. | 10:02 |
Seng greets Ngib | Seng: I'm Seng Theary. How do you do, everyone? | 10:17 |
| CAMPBELL: Pol Pot's real name was Saloth Sar. His brother Ngib looks uncannily like him. But that's where the resemblance ends. | 10:23 |
Seng with Ngib | NGIB: Everything is a consequence of your actions. What he did, according to Buddhism, will come back to haunt him. | 10:32 |
| CAMPBELL: Pol Pot treated his own family as badly as he treated his people, as Ngib's nephew-in-law explains. | 10:48 |
Nephew | NEPHEW: Actually Ngib was starving. He was sick, overworked, looking after the grandchildren. He had to work and eat just like everyone else. | 10:55 |
| SENG: Why did Saloth Sar do what he did? | 11:11 |
| NGIB: Oh I don't know. When he was young, he was a good person | 11:15 |
Seng listening | but when he came to power he killed and starved people and I still can't believe it myself. | 11:23 |
Ngib | What he did was wrong. | 11:30 |
Village meeting | CAMPBELL: The villagers have mixed feelings about the looming trials of the Khmer Rouge leaders. | 11:35 |
| NEPHEW: I think that the budget from the international community for the tribunal, so many millions, | 11:40 |
| if we used that money for the benefit of the country, for the people, and the victims, it would probably be better. That's my opinion. | 11:53 |
Court house | CAMPBELL: The UN-sponsored tribunal is expected to cost more than $70 million over three years to try fewer than a dozen people. | 12:07 |
Investigations chamber | Anyone expecting the tribunal to be a grand morality play detailing the history of Khmer Rouge atrocities will be disappointed. For a start it's only trying a small number of senior leaders and those most responsible, not the many thousands who carried out the killings. Even then, under the French system on which it's based, the tribunal will hear most of the evidence behind closed doors in this investigations chamber. | 12:17 |
Villagers with carts | While the tribunal will go some way to answering the questions of who did what, it won't be able to answer the question that continues to haunt Cambodians. Why? Why did so many people commit so much evil against their own? | 12:44 |
| Music | 13:00 |
Travelling to Pailin | CAMPBELL: To ask that question, we travelled north to one of the last men alive who could answer it. Pol Pot died in the jungle. But one of his closest lieutenants still lives in the old Khmer Rouge stronghold of Pailin on the Thai border . | 13:08 |
Khieu Samphan at home | Khieu Samphan was the public face of the Khmer Rouge from the early 1970s. | 13:26 |
Archival footage. Khmer Rouge camp | This rare footage from a Khmer Rouge camp in 1973 shows him meeting Cambodian prince Norodom Sihanouk. At the time, the prince saw the Khmer Rouge as patriots fighting US bombing and aggression. | 13:34 |
| Back then, Pol Pot was an anonymous figure in the background. Khieu Samphan now insists he was just a figurehead with no real power. | 13:50 |
| SAMPHAN: I really did not know what was happening in the country. | 14:03 |
Khieu Samphan | CAMPBELL: You had no idea about what was happening; the mass executions, the torture, the famine? | 14:10 |
| SAMPHAN: I was totally ignorant of all this. I was always within the Centre, within the precinct of the Centre, and with the rules we had as you know, the discipline rules, the imposed isolation at the time, which was done by all Communist Parties. And as you know the Kampuchean Communist Party was the most secretive of all. | 14:19 |
| CAMPBELL: But you were one of the longest serving members of the Khmer Rouge? | 14:57 |
| SAMPHAN: A long-serving member indeed, but not a leader. | 15:02 |
| I was just a companion on their journey. SENG: He knows. | 15:09 |
Khieu Samphan at lunch | We may not know the full details, but he knows the full details. And for him to be able to live with the knowledge that he destroyed a culture and a people, and then to still be living and breathing and act as if he's just a regular Khmer grandpa. CAMPBELL: Do you think those responsible for the massacres, | 15:16 |
Khieu Samphan interview | the executions, the torture, should be punished? | 15:41 |
| SAMPHAN: Sure. I condemn the torture, I condemn the massacres, but one must really, truly, find those who are indeed responsible. | 15:46 |
| CAMPBELL: Do you fear being judged by this tribunal? | 16:04 |
| SAMPHAN: No, frankly no. | 16:08 |
| CAMPBELL: While he IS expected to be charged, there's no guarantee he'd be convicted. | 16:12 |
Skilbeck walking down hallway to office | Rupert Skilbeck is a British barrister in charge of ensuring that the accused have a proper defence. | 16:23 |
| SKILBECK: The evidence against some of the likely defendants is not very strong | 16:32 |
Skilbeck. Super: | and the prosecution will have to prove that they knew what was going on and that they could have done something about it. In the case of some of the defendants that might be quite difficult to do. | 16:35 |
Court | CAMPBELL: The trials are also expected to be fertile ground for defence challenges. | 16:44 |
Judges at tribunal opening | A majority of judges are Cambodian. All suffered terribly under the Khmer Rouge, raising questions of impartiality. There have also been allegations of political interference and corruption -- including claims Cambodian staff have had to pay kickbacks to get their jobs. | 16:49 |
Khieu Samphan eating lunch | It's likely to drag out the trials of ageing defendants. Khieu Samphan is now 76. | 17:11 |
| SKILBECK: So far the court has been moving very slowly, unfortunately. We spent one year agreeing the internal rules of the court. Unless the court process speeds up in the near future, | 17:21 |
Skilbeck | there are going to be big problems in finishing these trials on time and on budget and with the defendants still alive. | 17:33 |
Seng at market. Child does handstand | CAMPBELL: For Seng Theary, the process of healing the country's wounds will take another generation. | 17:41 |
| Seng: Where did you learn to dance? Child: From my brother. | 17:46 |
| SENG: We're starting to discuss and to recognise that we have to deal with the demons within ourselves and within our culture. | 17:52 |
Seng | We pretend that they didn't exist, that our past is our past, that somehow we could forget our past and move on without having to confront it. It's not possible. | 18:00 |
Seng at temple | Music | 18:13 |
| SENG: I have forgiven them for what they've done. It's part of my healing process. | 18:21 |
| Having known anger, and having lived with anger for so many years, and all these other bundled negative feelings for so many years, | 18:28 |
Seng | I was emotionally imprisoned -- I was like this. I was not free. I feel free now. | 18:36 |
Credits: | Reporter: Eric Campbell Camera: David Leland Editor: Simon Brynjolffssen Producer : Marianne Leitch | 18:56 |